Story Time: Just Me and My Dad

Father’s Day is coming, my lovelies.  And if you have a beautiful husband like mine who is the best father you’ve ever known, then he deserves to be celebrated.  Your littles think their dad hung the moon, right?  So what story should we read to get them pumped about Father’s Day and celebrating that wonderful man?  Just Me and My Dad, of course.  Because Little Critter.  Am I right?

Just Me and My Dad Activities

What kinds of activities will go along with this story so your littles can be prepped for Father’s Day?  A slew of them.  Just look at the cover.  Take Dad fishing or camping for the big day.  Yeah yeah.  But you want stuff you can do at home with your littles, too, right?  Cool, then let’s get to it.

Language

Little Critter tells his dada a scary ghost story at their campfire in this sweet book.  Perhaps your little is a future Stephen King in the making.  Here’s a free download that gives your future horror writer a place to write his own campfire ghost story.

Science

Wanna do something really, really cool with your littles?  Next time you have a campfire or build a fire in your fire pit, after you’ve cooked your food and are settled down to watch the flames, add some color to your fire with a few simple household products.  Here’s a list of products you can use to to make your fire more interesting:

• Light green flame:  Borax
• Purple flame:  Water Softener Salt
• Orange flame:  Table salt
• White flame: Epsom salt

Just toss a handful onto the flames and you’ll get a temporary color change.

You can also make your fire spark with these products:

• Sugar: sprinkle onto the fire for tiny sparks
• Powdered coffee creamer:  Throw a handful onto the fire for sparkly flashes

Obviously, you–the grown up–should be in charge of this and you’ll be doing it at your own risk.  But it’s pretty awesome to see that chemical reaction.  If your littles are very young, they might not yet even realize fire causes a chemical reaction, so this would be a superb lesson.

Craft

Cardboard Canoe

What you need:

• Thin cardboard (such as a cereal box)
• Toothpicks
• Cream-colored construction paper
• Brown craft paint
• Scissors
• Lit Mama’s Canoe Template

What you do:

• Print out Lit Mama’s canoe template
• Use the template to cut the canoe pieces from the cardboard
• Hot glue the sides and the bottom together
• Paint your boat brown; set aside to dry
• Cut a small square from the paper and cut the sharp ends off of a toothpick
• Fold your square in half and place the toothpick into it end first like an oar handle
• Holding the toothpick inside the paper, put a dot of glue near the top to fasten the toothpick to the paper
• Cut the paper into triangle shapes for the oars

Wanna make a super cute Father’s Day card?  Glue your canoe to the front of a card.  Three-dimensional awesomeness.  Yeah yeah.

Food

Do we have to look any farther for a campfire snack than s’mores?  Um, I don’t think so.

If you don’t already know how to do this (you’ve lived under a rock, maybe), all you do is roast some marshmallows.  Break a graham cracker in half, place a piece of chocolate on one half, then a hot, roasted marshmallow, then top it with the other half of the graham cracker.  Done.

Yeah, you’re wanting to take Dad camping tonight, aren’t you?

Love wins,

KT

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KT Brison

KT Brison is a former children’s librarian and educator who gave all that up for the most important job in her life—homeschooling her boys.Though she loves the outdoors and rambling around her farm, she can usually be found with her nose in a book. Any book. As long as it has words.

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